Film

Mike Leigh never wanted to be labelled a Jewish film maker. He confessed to me several years ago that Woody Allen's Radio Days was one of his favourite films because it echoed on a very personal, family level, with all the shouting and relatives and his own retreat into a world of radio plays and music.

In Stamford Hill, I had a sense of discovering a completely new world. We all seemed to have something unique in common, a sense of going nowhere. Most of us had left school at 15, had passed no exams, were utterly rootless and therefore we belonged to each other.

It was the poet Philip Larkin who provided the most damning and potentially accurate assessment of parenting when he wrote: "They f--- you up, your mum and dad. /They may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ And add some extra, just for you."

When The Big Bang Theory's Simon Helberg got close to proposing to his wife, Jocelyn Towne, he panicked and broke up with her instead. She took off to Paris and he desperately went after her to try and salvage their relationship.

Asaf Korman must have realised that the chances of his film Next To Her becoming a box office hit were slight. He is, after all, a first time feature director and the subject he chose for the movie is not remotely commercial - a frank and at times uncomfortable portrayal of the co-dependent relationship between a school security officer and her seriously learning disabled sister.

According to my sources, Palo Alto is one of the most expensive cities in the United States and its residents are among the most educated in America. This and other little nuggets about the place - it is named after a tall tree and Joan Baez was born there - will hopefully lend a bit of colour to a place that is void of any in Gia Coppola's film.

When Linor Abargil was crowned Miss World in 1998, she burst into tears. Nothing particularly unusual about that - pretty much every beauty contest winner cries. But for the then 18-year-old Israeli, it was different. On a modelling assignment in Milan several weeks previously, she had been brutally raped by the Israeli travel agent who was supposed to be driving her to the airport.